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A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit

wired.com

71–80 of 85 posts

Re: A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit

#71

> He then wrote a $6,000 personal check for the reexamination fee... “It’s definitely not a drop in the bucket for me,” he says. > Swildens tells me from his home in Los Altos Hills, near Mountain View. I can't help but feel that he's not being totally genuine here

Most self-made million/billionaires tend to get there by being cognizant of the cost and benefit of every monetary expenditure. This doesn't count how assets like a home (especially one used by the owner directly) count very little towards someone's actual liquidity.

For a non-profitable move that is probably not even tax deductible, $6,000 is not a trivial investment.

Re: A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit

#72
post #25
post #7

Makes me wonder if Travis has a connection to Eric through Akamai. Eric's company, Speedera, was also acquired by Akamai in 2005. Travis's company, RedSwoosh, was acquired by Akamai in 2007.

I'm thinking the same thing. I mean... this whole article just smells off. It's a press hit about one patent claiming that somehow this invalidates the Waymo case in a dispute that is fundamentally about trade secrets anyway. I mean, he found prior art on a LIDAR patent. Good. But... why do we care?

The headline implies that. The content of the article actually only implies that it throws off Waymo's patent claims... and they did drop their patent claims related to 936.

Keep in mind, headlines are rarely written by the author of the piece. The headline writer has a very different goal than the reporter.

Re: A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Total funding on Speedera was $51M. So assume a liquidation preference takes at least $51M off the top. He was an engineer and not a founder or an exec. So yeah, I’ll take him at his word. He probably didn’t clear anywhere near a $1M. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/speedera-networks

The article states he was a co-founder and the crunchbase page has two other cofounders

The 'ERA' in 'Speedera' was from the first letter of first name of each of the founders, Eric Swildens, Rich Day, and Ajit Gupta.

Re: A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit

#74
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's absolutely the new norm. Most news sites have an autoplaying video on almost every article now. Sometimes the video will even follow you down the page as you scroll. Even worse, sometimes the video isn't even about the same story. I guess they just desperately need to show you a video even if they don't have a very relevant one. It's terrible, and yet another reason to block almost everything by default with som…

Also a good reason to disable autoplay in your browser.

In Firefox 57, shockwave allows disabling autoplay, but H264's plugin only gives you Always or Never; Ask is there but greyed out.

?

Re: A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit

#75
post #69
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If he owns a house which is worth at least 5.5M USD then he's more than a millionaire; at least a multimillionaire. Just to put it in perspective: 6k USD is 0,6% of 1M USD. If I got a savings of 10k USD, and I donate 0,6% of that to EFF during Christmas, then we're talking about 60 USD while I keep 9940 USD or 99,4%. Even that doesn't tell us much though because your networth isn't descriptive to your income. If you…

> If you own 0,5M but you don't have income that's something different than owning 0,5k but having 2k to spend every month. I think this is the key. Having a big fancy house usually comes with a big fancy mortgage, and who knows what his cashflow looks like. Did he invest his windfall and lose it? Did the tax man take it? Did his wife leave him soon after along with "half"? Any massive medical situations he's dealt w…

I lived in a town full of millionaires, and while I've met plenty who are just as or even more decent than the average person, there's also the ones who would spend 20€ on a piece of cake, but then not tip the waitress. Yet others seem to think that because they're so rich (and in their mind, that makes them important) they shouldn't have to pay for anything, even a penny is a penny to much for them, and the richer they are, the more time they spend whining about expenses. For some people, money is an end in itself, and that's because they have no personality worth writing home about and nothing else to fill their lives with. Nietzsche was exactly right when he said for some utterly impotent people money is the crowbar of power. But ironically, the more power they have, they weaker they become.

As I said initially, I don't mean "all rich people", not by a long shot -- but anyone who is rich and still a fully fledged human being will know even more of the people I'm talking about than I do -- and there's plenty of poor people who are petty, too. Idiocy and insanity don't care much for class. But just because people do something doesn't mean there is a good reason for it, sometimes it's really just psychopathology combined with not having anyone who is strong enough and cares for them enough, and/or no accidents of life, that force them to stop going deeper into their dead end. They need help, not excuses. That is not aimed at the person in the article, just generally.

Re: A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t have to invalidate the patents at the USPTO. You can argue invalidity in court. Uber almost certainly looked for prior art. And in most cases uber wouldn’t use ex parte re-examine. They’d do an inter partes review, which would them to stay in the proceeding and argue for invalidity.

What is the difference between inter partes review and ex parte re-examine?

The biggest difference is ex parte re-exam doesn't allow the requester to participate. It's just the patent owner and the examiners. If the patent owner makes an incorrect statement to try to keep the patent there is nothing you can do. An IPR is a full hearing on the validity. With evidence, depositions, briefing, and oral arguments.

Re: A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit

#77
post #70
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes their experts look incompetent. Quite a bit of what this guy found should have been low-hanging fruit for an expert witness.

Any chance they were saving that for the trial? Strategically, isn't it better for Uber to let Waymo yap on and on about it and then crush them during the trial than to ask the patent office for a review and let Waymo drop the issue before the trial even starts? I mean... if I knew something embarrassing that opposing council didn't know, and I had no obligation to inform them, I would definitely see that knowledge a…

>Any chance they were saving that for the trial?

Yes.

>Strategically, isn't it better for Uber to let Waymo yap on and on about it and then crush them during the trial than to ask the patent office for a review and let Waymo drop the issue before the trial even starts?

Uber would have to inform Waymo of their invalidity theory way before trial. You can't spring new prior art right before trial.

Re: A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit

#78
So Waymo was trying (and succeeding) to patent a basic electronic circuits designs that has existed for decades. This is not surprising at all as the grandiose claims of innovation coming out of SV, perpetuated by unscrupulous and mostly clueless tech news writers who don't understand the technology they're writing about, haven't had any substance behind them for a long while. The USPTO should be embarrassed as well for rubber stamping these applications coming from big companies.

Re: A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit

#79
post #11

I don't really understand why this guy would feel like he needed to use a lot of his own time and $6000 to try and help Uber. In the article it says that he felt like it was a larger competitor attacking a larger competitor, but its not like Uber is some small plucky startup. With revenue in the billions, its not like they couldn't even afford millions in legal fees easily. Or is it that its not helping Uber, but fig…

My take was that it was an interest in and dislike of patent lawsuits, combined with some knowledge of the actual area, especially since it was actual hardware and not software nonsense patents.

Re: A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit

#80
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also a good reason to disable autoplay in your browser.

In Firefox 57, shockwave allows disabling autoplay, but H264's plugin only gives you Always or Never; Ask is there but greyed out. ?

Set media.autoplay.enabled to false in about:config.
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